


There's nothing going wrong in your empty home

by liminalweirdo



Category: Ginger Snaps (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Coming of Age, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, but kinda, canadian af, not really a
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:07:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26817841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminalweirdo/pseuds/liminalweirdo
Summary: Sam, before Halloween, 1999.
Relationships: Brigitte Fitzgerald/Sam, Brigitte Fitzgerald/Sam McDonald, Sam McDonald/OC (mentioned), Sam McDonald/Trina Sinclair
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	There's nothing going wrong in your empty home

**Author's Note:**

> for the person who asked about Sam.
> 
> The main title (and subsequent chapter titles) comes from the song Barnes' Yard, by the Rural Alberta Advantage, which is a level of growing up small-town Canadian I hope this little story conveys.
> 
> originally going to be two parts, but it never felt right, so I've left it as is.

Sam lives inside the stories other people tell about him. He’s the guy who performs poorly in school, but is too smart for his own good, nonetheless. He’s the softspoken slacker who doesn’t do his homework, but will do the other kids’ — for a fee. Sam’s been pocketing the dollars of the high school masses since the moment he walked through those doors, and wondered what the fuck the point of it all was.

When he’s thirteen, _Heathers_ comes out, and he ditches school to go see it alone, mostly because he doesn’t want to sit through fucking fractions in math class, and only a little bit because he’s been in love with Winona Ryder since _Beetlejuice_ , all strange and dark-eyed and _I myself am strange and unusual._

Stepping back out into the watery mid-afternoon light of early October, he feels like it’s changed him, somehow. Maybe just because it’s not like all the other movies that come out that year, and the year before, and every other year — the ones that talk about high school like it’s the best goddamn thing on the planet. _Heathers_ tells a different story — like looking at life through a different lens and seeing things a little closer to the way that Sam sees it, but couldn’t articulate until now. All the posturing and the masks and the nonsensical politics of social life. 

And there’s that scene with Jason Dean, and _'our love is God'_ — blowing smoke from his nose into the cold night air, looking like the devil himself. Sam can’t deny that that’s pretty damn cool. He’s not about to strap a bomb to his chest and blow up the school or anything, but he still takes up smoking, and then pierces his own ear the following summer, and then deals with the infection that follows. Turns out the answer to some of his problems is not the Victory king-size cigarettes, but ditching the cheap mall ring for pure silver. He still doesn’t quit smoking anyway.

He graduates high school without fanfare and a girlfriend named Summer Healey who asked him out two days before school ended and is, all of a sudden, a real girlfriend and not a high school girlfriend, and it all feels very grown up and important but sort of… vacuous somehow. He wonders if this is the way it’s supposed to be, and if dating is all just Hollywood propaganda. They drink a lot, out at parties in the woods and at the tracks, and she’s the familiar soft body he presses against while they make out against a tree just out of the light of the bonfire, and they want and want and want _something,_ close and carnal, and even if it’s not really each other, it’s certainly able to be provided. Which he does, willingly, and so does she. They lose it to each other on the couch in her basement when her parents aren’t home, and her brother’s away at university, some sweltering night in September — the kind of night that’s still burning, feverish, with the heat of summer.

They stay together until she goes to university in Halifax the following September, and he feels like breakups should feel harder, but it just doesn’t. Not for either of them. They promise to keep in touch, but then never do, and last he heard she has a boyfriend on the East Coast, so that’s that. 

Sam drifts. He reads a lot. Sometimes he buys a Colt45 and goes down to the tracks for parties. Sometimes there’s other girls and long conversations and that feeling like, christ, everything’s so impossibly beautiful, even as the sunrise they stayed up all night to see is just watery and grey and brings with it this kind of lackadaisical rain. He thinks about studying biology in Toronto or Saskatchewan or maybe New York, and he helps his dad with the greenhouse to save some money for school, and maybe they fight too much, but not in any earth-shattering way. He sends off university applications and everything just after his nineteenth birthday and actually gets in to a few. That’s the summer his dad kills himself, out at the fishing cabin in the woods.

Everything dilutes, for a while. He hears all of it like he’s underwater — goes through the motions in this colourless landscape. 

The time after his dad’s death, the days and weeks and months that followed, were the longest of Sam’s life, and he doesn’t remember half of them. Most of the money he saved goes into the funeral and suddenly he’s left with the greenhouse and the apartment which he can’t stand to be inside. He buys a couch at a discount store and drags it into the office at work and sleeps on that for weeks. He spends the spring aggressively clearing out the storage room at the back of the greenhouse, just putting everything he’s keeping either into the back of the van or into increasingly cramped office and then uses the rest of his savings to remodel the corner of the back room into a tiny kitchen and put a tub and shower into the half bathroom. He buys a bed and goes back to the apartment just once to collect whatever he can fit into the van. Mostly clothes and kitchen things, boxes of photographs and books. He stops by the apartment office to tell them he’s cancelling the lease and leaves them to deal with the furniture he’s left behind because he just fucking can’t. He doesn’t want to.

The first night he spends in the greenhouse alone — the first night the greenhouse contains all he’s got left to his name — it feels like the start of something. For the first time in months, he feels like he really is sitting in his own body, that he’s actually existing again, in time and space. He had kind of forgotten that, for a while, but it feels good to remember. Sam throws himself into the work because it’s what he knows. He fucks up the billing and the taxes, but he doesn’t fuck up the plants. That means something. The plants depend on him, and they, in turn, keep him going, somehow. People, friends he knew in high school, and after, fall away one by one. For some, it takes longer than others, like leaves still clinging to their branches, even after the first snow. He gets it, though, those words just don’t intersect: he’s always working and their parents are still alive.

Over time, his room in the greenhouse is filled with whatever he can scrounge up from the ends of people’s driveways, and summer yardsales. It’s a slow process, but bit by bit it starts feeling kind of like home. Jim, at the used bookstore in town knows his situation, and he comes up with the old TV, the coffee table, the rug; like magic tricks — just happens to have them kicking around at the shop whenever Sam shows up for paperbacks, and he is overwhelmed by that kind of kindness and never figures out just how to say it.

That first winter in the greenhouse is so fucking cold that even with the space heaters, he gets bronchitis twice. The second winter is colder, he thinks, than the first, and he finally just takes the financial hit and has a wall heater installed. 

He’s twenty before he knows it, and then twenty-one, and by then it’s not new anymore, it’s just the rhythm of his life. He gets the contract with Bailey Downs High School himself, to do their grounds maintenance. It’s something his dad had been trying to get for ages, and Sam’s pretty goddamn proud of himself for accomplishing it on his own. It’s there, trimming hedges, that the younger brother of one of the guys he used to smoke and drink with down at the tracks finds him. 

“My brother says your weed’s better than the stuff Mitchell Tremblay sells down by the gas station,” he tells him, and all at once, the pot Sam’s started growing for himself as an experiment becomes something else when he realizes that people will buy off him. Mitchell Tremblay shows up the following week, probably to tell him to fuck off and sell somewhere else, but he shares a joint with Sam first because rumour has it that it gets you higher and doesn’t taste like shit. They smoke up, just the two of them, behind the school, and Mitchell croaks “Definitely gets you higher,” through a cloud of smoke. “Without all the fuckin’ effort I have to put in, too.” 

Sam is profoundly, ridiculously grateful for potheads.

That evening he buys the plants that Mitchell has left for a hell of a lot more than they’re worth, but it’s no hard feelings and, suddenly, Sam’s the county dealer.

That keeps him busy, for a while, but that old restlessness has been creeping up on him for a while, now. He manages to keep one step ahead of it until winter comes again. The greenhouse business slows down, and Sam’s stuck inside most days. At least, with the pot business and a better handle on how to fucking budget, he isn’t eating lukewarm cans of Alpha-ghetti for dinner most nights. He even gets cable. It’s different from the restless feeling he had in high school. Now it comes with an urgency, thin fingers clutching at his throat, a pressing down on his chest at night like _You’re never going to get out of here, are you?_ He tries not to look too closely at his life, because he thinks the closeness of it, the smallness — would fucking kill him. He always meant to get out of this town. 

Suddenly he’s stuck. University feels like a fantasy — as impossible as moving to Hollywood and becoming a movie star — a far-fetched dream that only fools and the very brave ever attempt. Sam isn’t either of those things, for better or for worse. The greenhouse surrounds him, protects him, like germination, except its like something’s gone wrong — the conditions weren’t right, or the timing, and whatever he’s supposed to be is stunted, cut off before it ever begins, and he never grows — never gets beyond this place. It holds him safe at the same time as it traps him, and maybe he’s just too fucking lazy to leave.

Maybe he’s too scared.

He meets Trina Sinclair at a college party where he’s just shown up to sell and to get out of town for a little while. Pretend, maybe, that he lives some other life. She sees him the way he wants to be seen. Sam the Man, with his sunglasses and surreptitious trade-offs of cash for grass from his van. He’s Glassjaw and Fear Factory blasting from his speakers. He’s Christian Slater, blowing twin streams of smoke into the night like the devil himself. He’s a fucking idiot.

Trina was a mistake, but not completely. Trina is the first person Sam gives a shit about in a long time. Trina cares, too. She cares about a lot of things, like her future and classic movies and her friends and supposed-to’s. They have almost nothing in common, and she tries too hard, and usually Sam lets her, and occasionally wishes she wouldn’t. Sometimes, after they sleep together, and she’s feeling accomplished and powerful and has him vulnerable, too, she talks to him in a way he thinks is probably what Trina’s really like, at the heart of her — whip-smart and contemplative and disillusioned, already at sixteen, about the world and her place in it. He should’ve told her she was more interesting when she wasn’t trying to be. Trina, Sam thinks, deserves better, but it takes him fucking months to come to that. Months where he just strings her along.

He’s an asshole, he’s always known that, and she finally does, too. It’s almost a relief when she calls him on it. It’s a relief when she sees him without any of the masks he wears. The illusion is wiped away, and he’s just one more fuck-up who didn’t mean to stick around as long as he has. 

Sometimes Sam is sick to death of the cycle of seasons.

That’s what he’s thinking when he almost runs over two girls on the 403. For one horrible moment he thinks he does hit them, and he slams the breaks, but not soon enough. He hits something, with a sickening thud, a splatter of blood over his windshield. Honestly, it’s like a goddamn horror movie, and when he finally squeals to a halt and steps out into the night to the smell of burnt rubber and viscera he doesn’t even realize that everything’s about to change, again.

Change kind of happens like that. Too slow to notice, or in one, wild, unimaginable moment — something that couldn’t possibly ever have been expected. He doesn’t feel different, when he crouches to examine the remains of what he hit — insides bared to the night sky, gorey ribcage steaming beneath the light of the full moon.

Thank christ it isn’t a person, but still—

“Fuck,” Sam says.

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of Sam's background, here, comes from conversations with ac0rntea, who I just love so freakin' much.
> 
> __
> 
> Find me on tumblr!  
> [ **liminalweirdo**](https://liminalweirdo.tumblr.com/)


End file.
